Semicommunication and accommodation:observations from the linguistic situation in Scandinavia

Abstract

The default in inter‐Scandinavian communication between Danes, Swedes and Norwegians is the use of the respective mother tongue together with the willingness to accept and understand the neighbouring standard languages. Einar Haugen in 1966 called this form of asymmetric communication ‘semicommunication’. This term has, however, been misleading because it suggests that the interlocutors will only understand roughly ‘half’ of what has been said, which is clearly not the (normal)case. The paper focuses on the relationship between semicommunication and accommodation and discusses two longer extracts from a large corpus of authentic communication. It is argued that semicommunication can adequately be described in terms of accommodation (convergence). Even the occurrence of code‐switching cannot be excluded. The discussion shows among other things that even grammatically incorrect accommodation may result in better understanding by the addressee. Various aspects of a comprehensive model of semicommunication are presented and discussed, showing that code‐switching and accommodation are not considered antagonistic but rather as scalar phenomena covering different speaker‐or addressee‐related strategies in interdialectal communication.